I’ve Had Enough Of You Water-Drinking, Air-Breathing Urban Elitists

Ben Jacobs’s piece reminds me of my favorite part of the Politico’s war on Nate Silver. As others have pointed out, this botched hack cliche is comedy gold:

For this reason and others — and this may shock the coffee-drinking NPR types of Seattle, San Francisco and Madison, Wis. — more than a few political pundits and reporters, including some of his own colleagues, believe Silver is highly overrated.

Look, I knew those snooty elitists in Seattle and San Francisco looked down on me and my kind, but now you tell me that they drink coffee? No real American would ever be caught dead consuming this obscure product.

I tell you, every election cycle it becomes harder to be a regular American. White wine, Lipton Green Tea, orange juice, Grey Poupon, coffee — every day you discover some product that my relatives in rural Saskatchewan would always have in their pantry that marks you as an out-of-touch urban elitist in the eyes of D.C.-based Ivy Leaguers.

We’ve had cars here in Sask-a-bush for several years now, and TV too!!!
Actually, I wonder if Byers wrote “latte-drinking NPR types” but had to change it because Politico had already reached its daily cliche limit before this was posted.

Gus

Coca-cola, French’s mustard, iceberg lettuce, those are real American delicacies! None of that snotty “coffee” for me.

avoidswork

‘Tis not snotty unless you have to pay an arm/leg for it (Blue Bottle or Revival) or hike a few blocks to the hipster coffee truck (Revielle) in SF.

KadeKo

I hope it’s the HFCS Coca-Cola and not the snooty “cane sugar” stuff.

CaptBackslap

HECHO EN MEXICO???

R C B

Where does all of this leave the “Wine and Cheese Liberals” who were crushed by George Wallace’s disdain. Where do we put REal Men who don’t Eat Quiche in this system of political cateogories?

Njorl

You toilet-paper-using elitists probably have special machines dedicated to just making coffee.

Bubba and Cletus don’t get into town much, but they always go for the county fair. One year, Bubba spots one a booth where you can toss a penny into a goldfish bowl and win a prize. Bubba tosses his penny right in on the first try and wins a toilet brush.

A month later, Bubba runs into Cletus in town. Cletus says, “Bubba, how you like that toilet brush you won?”

the character of juan valdez was played by a white man, with a very dark tan. at the time, the ad agency claims it was very difficult to find an actual hispanic man, capable of pretending to lead a burro, with fake mountains on the greenscreen behind him.

also too, the sacks actually contained only a thin layer of coffee beans on top, the balance filled with cocain. this is why the character of juan always had a HUGE smile on his face.

Bill Murray

the character of juan valdez was played by a white man, with a very dark tan.

Juan Valdez was initially portrayed by José F. Duval in both print advertisements and on television until 1969. José Duval died in 1993 at the age of 72.
Juan Valdez had been embodied by Carlos Sánchez since 1969 and voiced by Norman Rose. In 2006, Sánchez announced his retirement, and Carlos Castañeda, a grower from the town of Andes, Antioquia, was selected by the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia as the new face of Juan Valdez.

TL;DR: The onscreen actor has always been Hispanic. An Anglo voice-actor was used at one point (and I would strongly bet that was because the ads were being shot without audio for international distribution and had voice-over talent dubbed in later for local languages).

Wow, I didn’t realize all those Cammo & NRA-hat wearing dudes that I saw in Waffle House were LIBRULZ!!1!

DocAmazing

Put chicory into it, and all is forgiven.

Linnaeus

Not only am I in Seattle at this very moment drinking coffee, I’m drinking a cappuccino. I suppose I should expect to be deported at any moment now.

Keaaukane

You have to self deport.

Davis X. Machina

or self derp….

Patrick

In Seattle, drinking a mochaccino, and just printed out my tickets to Friday’s playoff game… and the game is soccer! Top that, fellow effete liberals.

P.S. Go Sounders!

Steve H

Meanwhile, I’m here in the reddest of the red states, trying to get tickets to the second leg of that little clash. Only I may not get them because even this little part of Galt’s Gulch is so overrun with commie elitists that RSL has been selling out all of their recent games.

Soccer is the major sport in only two of the top ten countries in population. “Nearly the entire world”, I don’t think so.

Bill Murray

Football is the portmanteau, soccer is a condensation of association

CaptBackslap

True/False: MLS would be much better off if they made their clubs rename themselves so as not to come across as knockoff versions of European clubs.

I mention this here because “Real Salt Lake” is the most laughable example of all.

Jameson Quinn

Wow. That’s so bad, it took me reading it three times just to get it. And I live in a place where even my 8-year-old daughter has been pressured by her catholic-girl’s-school classmates to make the choice between Barsa and Real.

Steve H

Guilty as charged. It’s become natural to me after seven years, but the other day my daughter asked me to explain the meaning, and I was just stumped.

Patrick

I thought it was because they really loved Franco in Utah…

Patrick

Damn HTML ate my note of sarcasm. Just to be clear, I’m only calling them fascists in a good natured, joking way.

spencer

Yeah, I think they should use old NASL names whenever possible. But then again, off the top of my head I don’t know if there was a NASL team in SLC …

Ramon A. Clef

Some of the old NASL names are currently in use in the new NASL. The Rowdies won the NASL Soccer Bowl last Saturday night. It was a hell of a game,took me two days to recover my voice.

wjts

Inasmuch as one of the league’s founding teams was originally known as the Kansas City Wiz, Real Salt Lake actually represents an improvement.

CaptBackslap

Now it’s “Sporting KC,” which makes it sound like the Mittster himself owns the team.

Bill Murray

or KC is Fall River on the Mississippi

Matt_L

Go Sounders!

timb

i saw a Sounders game once and, shockingly, yhr match ended nil-nil.

Warren Terra

Poser. I saw a Sounders game a couple of leagues ago, back before that team, and league, disbanded.

Scott Lemieux

Unlike me, none of you urban elitists have seen the only AUTHENTIC NASL team, the Calgary Boomers.

Major Kong

Of course you’re drinking a cappucino. Ever tried to find a regular cup of coffee in Seattle?

parrot

out here in the mouth-breather mountains located in the red state of nc (aka hillbilly country … bug tussle town pop < 2k), i roll only with intelligentsia house blend (thems some awesome beans) … i'm providing spiritual ballast & healing vibes to the mountains … these peeple flunked demography-statistics-actuarial thought processing … didn't they get the memo: the earth is flat … we even go to barbers, spas, salons, massage, wellness centers for grooming & pampering … really, we’ve been moving cosmo-metro-sexual since the indoor plumbing hegemony and dancing with the stars … yet another leftist plot to undo traditional values …

(the other) Davis

I (mis-)spent my adolescence taking full advantage of the bottomless coffee at the 24-hour truck stop diner that was inexplicably sited in my tiny town on I-87. Color me shocked to learn that all those long-haulers were liberal elitists.

Cody

They only vote for Romney to repent for their sin of being liberal by drinking coffee.

Njorl

I’m getting an advertisement for “Sobrexo” which promises that I’ll stop drinking in 8 weeks. Will this help me stop drinking coffee? Does it work on the addiction only, or will it address my underlying, perverse anti-American reasons for drinking coffee?

You stop drinking everything, and absorb moisture through the skin. You’ll pray for humidity. Eventually, roots.

Snarki, child of Loki

They can have my coffee when they pry it from my cold, dead, decaffeinated fingers.

Jonas

Oddly enough, back in 2008 the pundits attacked Obama for not being able to connect to real Americans because he asked for orange juice one time when he was offered coffee. Back in 2008, real Americans always drank coffee.

El Guapo

Hell you say?!? We’ve *always* been at war with Eastasian coffee.

catclub

And it does not get brought up much now, when Mitt the Mormon no drinks the coffee substance.

Warren Terra

In terms of Mitt’s consumption of food and drink, I’m much more grimly fascinated by the reports that for the duration of the campaign he’s on some specially designed liquid diet than I am interested in his religiously inspired dietary restrictions.

We inhabitants of San Francisco were the pioneers of understanding the pleasures of teabags. In multiple different senses of teabag. Does that mean we are the vanguard of the Party?

gocart mozart

The teabaggers took a perfectly good word that merely meant licking someones balls and turned it into something sick and perveted.*

*Joke stolen from Bill Maher

Malaclypse

Oddly enough, back in 2008 the pundits attacked Obama for not being able to connect to real Americans because he asked for orange juice one time when he was offered coffee. Back in 2008, real Americans always drank coffee.

ok, i looked. it doesn’t say how many corn dogs i get, or when they get delivered. in fact, nowhere in the ad, except at the very top, are corn dogs even mentioned. i believe this is fraudulent advertizing! i wants me some SD corn dogs, dammit!

oh, i must say, i do like how that lady candidate’s shirt is open just so far……………

I may need to look up “corn dog party” on urban dictionary. It sounds like I’m missing something here.

Jonas

Hell that ad made me want to vote for Varilek. He achieved the rare corndog/beer triple/double.

Bill Murray

what is the third part? 10 corndogs, 10 beers, 10 ? trips to the bathroom?

Jameson Quinn

He’s like a Bond villain of corn dogs! While she’s like… um… a Stepford wife inexplicably included in a Bond movie? No, that would be too obvious… she must secretly be the villain, and she’s just taking the tracking device off her car, like Gustavo Fring. Anyone that clean has got to be dirty.

Bill Murray

well he promises to show up to Ag committee meetings, speak at them and not get spoken to about talking on his cell phone when he shows up. All of which is more than Kristi Noem could do.

Hogan

Why, he’s been places and et in hotels. Get out the tar and feathers.

Joseph Smith, Jr.

As I’ve always said: don’t trust the warm beverage drinking heathens.

Keaaukane

I’ve been told that iced coffee is OK for Mormons, if you just go by the writings of Mr. Smith

I think they probably meant the cliched term of disparagement “latte-drinking”, but their brain inserted an alternate term. Kind of like when people say “I could care less” not realizing what it actually means.

The fact is, here in the Heartland, we eat Elia’s pizza and drink Ecto-Cooler for every meal.

Just Dropping By

Wow, I just realized how long it’s been since I had an Ecto-Cooler!

Mudge

I find it interesting that the right wing seems to firmly believe that prediction leads to victory. Any sensible person knows Nate Silver succeeds by being as correct in his evaluation of the polls as possible. Yet, the right believes everyone is partisan because they are partisan in all things. Science is politics and polling is politics. Dick Morris today predicted that Romney will win in a landslide, as if saying it will make it so. Wishing hard enough makes it happen.

It seems the smearing of Silver has a much more pathological basis. The right believes that Silver has the power to get Obama elect via his predictions.

Obviously, the right thinks Silver should spend more time hanging around the salad bar at Applebees than at his computer.

NonyNony

I find it interesting that the right wing seems to firmly believe that prediction leads to victory.

I think this falls firmly into the right-wing attitude towards everything. If you project an air of “winning” then you will be a “winner”. Silver is saying Obama might win, therefore Silver is in the tank for Obama because he’s helping to project an air of Obama victory.

Any sensible person knows Nate Silver succeeds by being as correct in his evaluation of the polls as possible.

Um. Silver is a pundit who is employed by the New York Times.

I agree with you that what you say above is true of Nate Silver and if his evaluation of the polls is off he will be hammered for it. But “sensible people” can be forgiven if they assume that a pundit who writes for the New York Times will face no possible downside of being wrong with his predictions – nobody has ever been booted from the pundit class for being “wrong” about anything. That’s how Bill Kristol, Dick Morris and plenty of other folks continue to find paying work.

catclub

Well, Bill Kristol _did_ lose his perch at the NYT.

Amazing but true.

Quercus

I think you’re right about Silver-hate being rooted in the ‘winners win’ and ‘facts don’t exist’ right-wing ideology, but I think there’s also a huge fear (and therefore hatred) of him among pundits regardless of political persuasion. I mean, Nate is making predictions based on facts and publicly available data, not on vague feelings and gossip at dinner parties in Georgetown or The Hamptons. Why, if that catches on, all you need to be an expert is smarts and dedication. And where would the average pundit be then?

NonyNony

Oh I’m sure there’s some of that too. You get that in any field where new methods based on empirical data collection start to muscle in on territory formerly held by people pulling stuff out of various orifices.

I always think of conversations I’ve had with older linguist PhDs about how the whole field is going to hell now that there’s an expectation that examples be collected and examined empirically instead of being made up off the top of one’s head based on the individual linguist’s idea of how English is spoken. I can only imagine that what’s going on in pundit circles is about like that, except that the “damn statistics” are different.

This thread is one of the most entertaining I’ve seen for days if not weeks, but that comment truly does stand out.

Reilly

I understand Byers wrote the original copy for the Club for Growth attack ad against Howard Dean. Unfortunately they had to let him go and punch it up a little:
“Howard Dean should take his coffeelatte-drinking, fishsushi-eating, carVolvo-driving, newspaperNew York Times-reading, movieHollywood-loving, political ideologyleft-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.”

Davis X. Machina

It’s Vermont. In other words, get outside of Burlington and they’re all drinking Moxie, and Allen’s Coffee Brandy, and doing donuts in their 4WD’s on frozen lakes and ponds.

rea

Forget it, Jake. It’s Vermont.

Malaclypse

they’re all drinking Moxie

Punishment enough, I say.

mds

Well, that’s why the Club for Growth copyeditors get paid the big bucks. “Howard Dean should take his coffee, fish car, newspaper movie political ideology” just doesn’t have the same punch. Especially since hardly anyone back then knew that Dr. Dean drove around in a newspaper-wrapped fish while wearing Luca Brasi’s coffee-stained pants. Talk about inside baseball.

Wido Incognitus

1. I have seen enough jars of Grey Poupon to know that it is spelled “grey” and not “gray.”
2. I still believe in the value of following patterns of behavior that are rooted in your own community instead of affectation and self-indulgence, although I am probably not willing to infer any political lessons from that and certainly do not consider coffee, at least in its foamless forms, to be either affected or self-indulgent.

rea

Maurice Grey and Auguste Poupon founded the company.

Warren Terra

I thought this must be a joke until I looked it up. Unless someone just snuck it into Wikipedia, of course …

Lyanna

Yeah, I couldn’t let this pass:

I still believe in the value of following patterns of behavior that are rooted in your own community instead of affectation and self-indulgence

WTF? You believe in not drinking hot beverages that those around you don’t care for, in other words. This seems to be taking sheep-like communitarianism to new depths.

NonyNony

I still believe in the value of following patterns of behavior that are rooted in your own community instead of affectation and self-indulgence

Jeebus are you Amish or something? Are you afraid that outside communities will taint your precious bodily fluids or something?

If you’ll excuse me I’ll just go for dinner now. I think it may be pizza. Or perhaps a burrito. Maybe a sandwich. All of which of course are deeply rooted in my community back to the dawn of time – because it’s unAmerican and inhuman to allow ideas from other communities to become incorporated into one’s own.

Jameson Quinn

Burritos are in fact an “American” idea. Burritos are small flour tortillas wrapped around a single ingredient; you have to order 3 or 4 to have a real meal.

Not true. They are from Mexico. The name (as told to me by an actual Mexican) meaning little burro refers to the packaged to carry nature of the food.

Hogan

[pissy but, you know, slightly accurate comment about how Mexico is actually in North America, and we USians don’t really get to own the word “American,” much as we assume we do]

Jameson Quinn

The idea of a food named after a little burro which involves flour tortillas is Mexican, which makes it American but not “American”. The super buh-REE-toe which is a meal unto itself is born in the USA.

Wido Incognitus

I don’t think that following those patterns are the only valuable thing, and I think there is value in doing things that are not rooted in your community’s practices. Nothing in my post suggests that I believe in not drinking hot beverages that other people around me do not care for. I am just skeptical of types of contrarianism that are really a form of chic consumer-conformity.

Wido Incognitus

It’s just that I think that customary practices play an important role in society and they should not be ignored or suppressed too much.

You keep doing this thing where you stake out a firm general position against something that no one has argued in favor of. I’m not sure this is as meaningful as you think it is.

STH

Behaviors have value if they have value. What value does something provide just by being the thing we’ve done for a while? And how is doing something on that non-basis any better than doing something because it’s the thing that we haven’t done here?

STH

Shorter Wido: my conformity can beat up your conformity.

Froley

The LGM posts about beverages are my favorite ones. I’m not leaving until this evolves into a 400 comment mini-flame war arguing over what west coast microbrewery makes the best coffee porter.

I am opposed to the inclusion of coffee into porter, largely because I dislike coffee. That’s one reason why Deschutes Black Butte Porter is so great–a well-crafted beer that doesn’t need to fall back upon the inclusion of strong outside flavors.

Is that a good enough start?

Linnaeus

Best beer Deschutes makes.

Jason

Redchair says hey

Keaaukane

I prefer their seasonal Jubeale.

Gus

Excellent! Rheinheitsgebot or death!

Alan Tomlinson

The Rhein is a river, and rein means pure in German. The word you are looking for is Reinheitsgebot.

Cheers,

Alan Tomlinson

Froley

Perfect, thank you.

parrot

Deschutes Black Butte Porter

plays the race card … diy: beer + espressoshots + haircuts

wjts

Porters are OK, coffee porters less so, and the best American beers are brewed in the Upper Midwest and New England. Flame on!

Just arrived from Krugman’s link.
~~
“why?” asked the blonde. “that bird’s gotta be a mile away by now!”
~~
Ye cud afford an Oldsmobile?
We had ta poot axles on grandpa to get OUR Olds rolling!
~~
French cars run on ennui.
~~
Must leave now. Laughing too damned hard. Thanks.

W. Kiernan

Squire Higbee wrongs me to say
That I died from smoking Red Eagle cigars.
Eating hot pie and gulping coffee
During the scorching hours of harvest time
Brought me here ere I had reached my sixtieth year.